Skip to main content

Featured

The chaos theory of Mongolia

I returned to Mongolia 15 years ago after an absence of 13 years, save for the occasional 2-week leave from work, and that time I spent a semester and a half at a local university drinking endless cups of brown, watery 150 Tugrik instant MaCcoffee at the cafĂ© strangely, or perhaps egotistically, named "In my memory", writing the first and so far the only book that got us into trouble with the local intelligence who apparently had little else to do than to pore through the ramblings of teenagers to catch the tell-tale signs of drug dealery. But I digress. When you visit a country for a short period, be it home or not, you hardly have time to immerse yourself in the spirit of the country and the city and feel the nitty gritty and dirty shiny of it all. So after 13 years, it took me a while to readjust and finally understand what the hometown of my childhood had become.  The most striking, ubiquitous, and inescapable feature was and still, unfortunately, is the traffic. In 2008,...

Mongolia : The Greatest Conspiracy of Cartographers?

Thought i'd post about where exactly Mongolia is. Mongolia used to be neighbours with Nepal, Tibet, India, Russia, Zimbabwe, Papua New Guinea, Kazakhstan, Loch Ness, Atlantis and Pakistan...

BUT a few years ago, we decided that these were just too many neighbours to share borders with, and elected to share borders only with 2 countries: China and Russia. Just to piss people off, we decided, let's not share borders with Tibet anymore, let's move our country to the NORTH, above China (note, I write above China, not in China, coz we're a country.). Of course, those reading may or may not know that Tibet is in the SOUTHWEST of China. China is a big fucken country. That means you cannot walk from Mongolia to Tibet, and that we are NOT neighbours, though we may look alike to you. After all, Mongolians can look like anything. But I hear that we most resemble Zulus. Sort of a cross-over between a Zulu and a Japanese, if you will. And a dash of Russian for the Buriat Mongols, and a dash of salt for the Sea Mongols, who are sighted very rarely nowadays as to be suspected of extinction and / or evolution beyond the physical.

Ah, but I digress, so Mongolia is the diarrhea-coloured splat on the above map. We are at the outskirts of Asia, so much so that we think we're hardly Asian. Seeing as the only Asian country we have contact with as a neighbour is China, and seeing as our relationship with China has been one of extreme dislike and nigh-hatred, I'd say we don't have much of a relationship with Asia, or anybody else for that matter. Except for America, whom we helped by sending 120 of our soldiers to die in the irrelevant war in Iraq. Knock on wood, I do hope those boys are alright.

In any case, my main point here is that, Mongolia hasn't been a geographically dynamic country for some time. We've decided to stay put where we are now, and not go around being neighbours with Nepal or Tibet or any other countries about whom nobody gives a shit about, just like Mongolia. But i suppose that's the human mentality. People just want to bundle up these crap countries together, and dump them in some corner of the earth where they won't have to look at them, like stuffing useless bits'n'pieces in a wardrobe. And one day, they really have to open that darn wardrobe to get something out and everything comes a crashing down.

As technology advances, human ignorance continues to remain exactly where it was, refusing to move. As knowledge and information fill up the internet and the airwaves, humans continue to ignore it all, shut it all out, and watch tv. TV that tells them all Mongolians ride horses, live in nomadic houses (gers), hunt and herd sheep, TV that tells them Julia Roberts first discovered Mongolia, and named Mongolia after one of her favourite BBQ restaurants in New York: The Mongolian BBQ, TV that perpetuates wrong names like "Genghis Khan"(it's Chingghis) and "Kubla Khan" (Khubilai).

Popular Posts